This is post number three in a four-part series on Denver’s streetcar legacy and its role in neighborhood walkability. For the introductory post, click here and for the second post, click here. To get the most out of this post, I recommend taking a look at my app and selecting the Streetcar Legacy section on the sidebar.

Just as cars and highways shaped the urban form of modern American metropolitan areas by encouraging dispersed patterns of development, a similar process occurred with the streetcar in the first half of Denver’s history. Denver once existed as a very compact city with development reaching only as far as the edges of the modern central business district. When the streetcar entered the picture, the footprint of the city began to expand along the streetcar routes. As late as 1933 (first three images below on left) the development of the city was tightly bound to the streetcar lines. The city existed as a grid of streets with rows of buildings clustered tightly about the streetcar lines, with open land only a few blocks beyond.

The difference between rail transit and highways lies in the degree of dispersion. With the streetcar, people had to walk to and from the stops. This naturally limited this distance that buildings could be built from the stops to no more than about a half mile, often less. With highways (below far right) this is not the case. When a motorist exits a highway, they continue to drive until they reach their final destination, where they can then almost always park on site. Walking is hardly a factor anymore, so development can spread farther from the highway without any travel time sacrifice.

So walking is part of any transit trip. You have to walk from your origin to the closest transit stop, and from the transit stop where you get off to your destination. This was daily life for most Denverites in the first half of the city’s history and the built environment was configured to facilitate this with a tightly gridded street pattern clustered about the streetcar lines. Additionally, commercial centers also developed on the same streets as the streetcar right-of-way. This allowed the people walking to and from the streetcars to purchase goods and services before continuing on their way.

These commercial nodes capitalized on the foot traffic generated by the streetcar to succeed. As a result, every neighborhood in the city had a vibrant commercial center and nearly every household in the city was within walking distance of most of their daily needs.

Today, the streetcars are gone, but many of these commercial centers remain. The most obvious examples are the continuous corridors on arterial streets like Broadway and Colfax, but they are also scattered on more neighborhood-oriented streets like South Pearl near Florida, Gaylord at Mississippi, and Tennyson at 41st. It is these neighborhood commercial nodes that are particularly special because they lack the noisy and dangerous automobile traffic of bigger streets, and are therefore more pleasant for the pedestrian. For my master’s capstone project, I mapped every single one of them.

There are no official terms that describes these developments that I could find in any academic or urban planning literature. Therefore I have come up with my own: Streetcar Neighborhood Commercial Development, or SNCDs for short. I define them as clusters or corridors of pedestrian-oriented commercial buildings (POCBs) located adjacent to an abandoned streetcar line on a road with fewer than four vehicle lanes. So let’s break down the term. The “streetcar” refers to how the buildings once depended on the people who rode the streetcar. The “neighborhood” means that they are neighborhood serving. Therefore, big arterial roads with four or more lanes are excluded. Finally, the “commercial development” refers to how the buildings must contain some sort of business, whether it is a store or an office.

So what is a pedestrian-oriented commercial building (POCB)? They are the kinds of commercial buildings which are clearly built with pedestrian access in mind. Again I came up with my own criteria based on the patterns I saw in the buildings and defined them as two grades:

Grade One POCB: A commercial building built up to the sidewalk with no off-street parking setback. Side parking and lawns must consume less than 40% of the lot. Rear parking must not be larger than double the building footprint (below left).

Grade Two POCB: A commercial building with a sidewalk to building entrance parking setback less than the length of the building starting from the main entrance (below middle).

All other buildings are AOCBs, or automobile-oriented commercial buildings (below right).

While mapping them, I soon found that SNCDs come in many shapes and sizes. Because of this, I also decided to classify them based on their size, their provision of POCBs, and their health. I came up with six categories, shown in the text and images below. Going down the text corresponds to the images from left to right…

Exceptional Main Street: These SNCDs have a historic main street feel and consist of an approximately 600+ foot street segment with Grade One POCBs covering at least 75% of the street frontage on both sides.

Quality Cluster: More of a cluster than a corridor, these have > 75% of their street frontage lined with Grade One POCBs, but are not large enough to qualify for “main street” designation.

Mixed Main Street: These are large corridors, but have more automobile oriented buildings, Grade Two POCBs, and/or parking lots mixed in, causing the percentage of Grade One POCBs to fall below 75%.

Mixed Cluster: Same logic. Like a Mixed Main Street, but not large enough.

Corner Store: Any isolated POCB which contains multiple businesses. I did not account for those which only contain one business because they are harder to locate.

Degraded: SNCDs where most of the buildings are vacant, have been torn down, or have been converted to residential uses. This is not comprehensive, and there are certainly many more. In the final image below, you can see modern day Old West Colfax. It was once entirely lined with buildings, but now only a few remain, replaced by parking lots.

If you made it this far, I think you would benefit by looking at my application. The locations of all the SNCDs are mapped out and I have included additional goodies like information about the parcels contained within each one and links to Google Street View imagery. You can also access that 1933 aerial of the entire city.

Having mapped the location of every SNCD in Denver, I wanted to know how they affect the walkability of the neighborhoods in which they are situated. In the next and final post of the series, I will present an analysis of this in one of Denver’s neighborhoods.

This is post number two in a four part series on Denver’s streetcar legacy and its role in neighborhood walkability. For the introductory post, click here. To get the most out of this post, I recommend taking a look at my app and examine the Streetcar Routes section. This will allow you to look at every streetcar route that ever existed in the modern city proper and filter them using a time slider to see what routes existed during any given year.

Once upon a time, there were no cars in Denver. In 1861, when the city was incorporated, people traveled around town either by foot or by horse. By 1870 the town had grown to a population of about 4,700 people and became large enough to make walking from one side to the other time consuming. Not everybody had the luxury of getting around by their own private or hired horse. In 1872 the Denver Horse Railroad Company built the first public transit line in Denver. It consisted on a horse drawn rail carriage going from Auraria to modern Curtis Park.

By 1880 the trackage had expanded modestly, perhaps doubling in total length, covering an area from Broadway at Speer to Larimer at 33rd going north-south, and Federal to Ogden going east-west. The population in this time however had ballooned seven-fold to 35,000. News reports at the time lamented the inadequate state of the network. In the face of pent-up demand and continued population growth, the 1880s saw the biggest single-decade expansion of the network in its 78-year history.

By 1890, when the population tripled to 106,000, nearly every block in downtown and modern Five Points/RiNo had a streetcar line. Lines covered the full length of Broadway and Colfax, and the northwest side around Berkeley had multiple routes. These lines were built by many fiercely competitive startup companies. Competition was so intense, that on occasion one company would rip up the rails of another while building their own!

New means of conveyance also appeared. Many of the new routes were cable cars (below left). Driven by a central powerhouse, miles of sunken cables moved along next to the tracks, which the cable cars latched onto for propulsion. Additionally, steam engine streetcars were also built, including one which went out to the newly relocated University of Denver campus. In the early 1890s the electric streetcar came on the scene, powered by overhead wires (below right). By the time of the economic Panic of 1893, they had become dominant. The Denver Tramway Company owned the bulk of these superior electrified lines, and was thus better positioned than its competitors.

When I first set out on this digitization project, I wanted to record the means of conveyance of each line. I found this to be impossible however because the network was simply too dynamic and too complicated with all these different companies operating. Oftentimes one street would have multiple companies operating multiple tracks, each with a different propulsion mechanism. I had assumed that the network was operated by one company and grew in an orderly fashion over the streetcar’s whole history. How wrong I was!

The recession in 1893 largely brought a halt to street railway expansion, and ushered in an era of consolidation. Companies merged, and redundant lines were taken out of service. By the new century the Denver Tramway Company emerged with a monopoly on streetcar service operation in Denver. Expansion picked up again in the early 20th century, but at a much slower pace. By this time automobiles had become affordable to a large swath of the population and the Tramway became aware of the threat it posed.

In 1915 they commissioned an interesting survey of the mode share of people traveling in and out of the central business district. 51% rode streetcars, 38% walked, 13% drove automobiles, 6% rode bicycles, 1% drove motorcycles, and 1% used horses. They also found that compared to 1914, streetcar patronage had dropped by 9% and driving had doubled. However in subsequent years the raw numbers of streetcar patronage again increased.

It was around 1917 that the streetcar system reached its peak in terms of coverage (below) with the construction of a line to Barnum. After this was a long decline, with many lines being taken out, and the last new segment being built in 1923. Looking at ridership itself, it peaked in 1910, with 87,819,000 passengers. At the time, 3,000 automobiles were present in the city. By 1928, the number of private automobiles had increased to 78,000 and streetcar ridership declined by 59%.

The late 1920s and early ’30s marked the beginning of the conversion of many rail routes to bus routes but, as in the Panic of 1893, the Great Depression put a stop to this, stabilizing the rail system until 1940. At this time, trolley coaches, which are essentially buses powered by overhead electric wire, along with gasoline buses, began replacing some of the less heavily used streetcar routes. This conversion process didn’t last long though, ending with the removal of rail tracks on 16th Street in July of 1941, because soon the United States became party to World War Two after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Gasoline and rubber were rationed due to the war effort, causing ridership to increase for the last time, and the system again remained stable until the end of the war in 1945.

After the war the economy boomed and a huge push for modernization in all aspects of life occurred. Many Denverites regarded the streetcars as ancient, noisy, and obsolete. With the advent of larger diesel buses, the removal of the streetcar lines accelerated, and the plurality in terms of transportation mode share that the streetcar had enjoyed since the late 1800s came to an end. By 1951, all streetcar lines were gone and the Denver Tramway became an all bus and trolley coach operation. The electric trolley coaches themselves were taken out of service in 1955.

In the first half of Denver’s history, public transportation in the form of streetcars was the dominant mode of travel that people used to get around. Because of this, most of the city proper was built around these lines. In our next post, we will take a look at how the built environment developed in symbiosis with the streetcars, and how that legacy remains with us today.

~~~

The images of the first horsecar route, the trolley bus, and the color streetcar are from Denver’s Street Railways Volumes I and II. If you are interested in the history of Denver’s streetcars, I highly recommend taking a look at these books, as they are filled with fantastic images and a brilliant historical narrative. They served as my primary data source for the route mapping, along with most of the information in this post. The remaining non-map images are courtesy of Denver Public Library Digital Collections.

Many people, even some longtime residents of the city, would be surprised learn that Denver once had a world-class public transportation system in the form of streetcars. These street railways existed for 78 years of the city’s history and once densely covered a large portion of the modern city proper. Below is a map (source) of the system in 1913.

Although long gone today, evidence abounds of the streetcar’s presence in the city, mainly in the form of old commercial strips lining arterials like Colfax and Broadway, and embedded in neighborhoods on streets like South Pearl (below left) and Tennyson. This legacy in the built environment is not only valuable for its history and aesthetic. It also contributes to the walkability of Denver’s neighborhoods. Because these developments are scattered in close proximity to residences, more people are within walking distance to many types of businesses and services than they would otherwise be, as seen in the map (below right) of northwest Denver.

As a master’s student studying GIS (geographic information science) at the University of Denver, I recently completed a capstone project that focuses on this subject matter. Over the next couple of weeks, I will post several articles about the results of this project and the interactive web mapping application that I built for it. For this first post, I provide some background on how I came to focus on this topic for my master’s capstone…

I left car-dependent suburban Indianapolis where I grew up to attend graduate school here in Denver. I had a vague idea to use GIS to study something relating to urban sustainability, but I wasn’t sure what exactly. So I delved into the academic literature and soon came upon the subject matter that has become my driving passion to the present day: the negative externalities of cars and the role that the urban built environment plays in influencing our transportation mode choices.

I learned that the sprawling development patterns of most American cities (see Google image below), with their low densities, segregated land uses, and poor pedestrian design are directly responsible for the vast majority of Americans needing to drive everywhere. This has resulted in many very poor outcomes for the well-being of our urban communities. Over 35,000 people died in car accidents and over 2 million were injured in 2015, resulting in an annual economic impact of over 200 billion dollars in medical costs and property damage. Cars are also implicated in our outrageous obesity rates because they facilitate inactive lifestyles, their tailpipes spew pollution and contribute to global climate change, they cause tremendous noise pollution, and they erode community social capital by preventing social encounters in the public domain.

Urban municipalities all over the country, including Denver have recognized this and have set goals to reduce our excessive level of automobile dependency. After exploring various potential directions that I could take based on the academic literature that deals with these issues, I decided to change paths and seek a client for my project instead. I found a planner at Denver’s Community Planning and Development department named Andrew Rutz who was interested in working with students. He was curious about the pleasant, pedestrian friendly commercial corridors I mentioned earlier and having me do a GIS project around that. I really liked the idea and ran with it.

I proposed to focus on three related themes: the actual streetcar routes, the legacy of the streetcar in the built environment, and the impact of that legacy on neighborhood walkability. I planned to do a great deal of GIS digitization and analysis on these topics, and then host the results on an interactive web mapping application, viewable to the public, called an ESRI Story Map.

In the upcoming posts, I am going to delve into each of these three related concepts. By clicking on the link below, you can open the Story Map application. A map dominates the right side of the screen, and a sidebar is present on the left. The sidebar has three sections that control the content of the map. Under each section header are text and pictures that explain the map under consideration.

Streetcar Routes: This section displays every streetcar route that ever existed in the city of Denver. By using the time slider, you can see how the network was configured year-by-year, from the first horsecar line in 1872 to the last streetcar lines in 1950.

Streetcar Legacy: This section maps every Streetcar Neighborhood Commercial Development, a concept of my own devising, in the modern city of Denver.

Streetcar Neighborhood Walkability: This takes a look at a northwest Denver neighborhood to see how Streetcar Neighborhood Commercial Developments impact the ability of residents to access their day to day destinations on foot.

For this introductory post, I will just leave the application here for you to explore on your own. In the next three posts, I will delve into each section in more detail and explain why any of this matters. Next up will be the Streetcar Routes.

~~~

Featured image at top, courtesy of Denver Public Library Digital Collections. View of 16th and Arapahoe (1911). Source.

]]>http://denverurbanism.com/2017/08/denver-streetcar-legacy-and-its-role-in-neighborhood-walkability.html/feed11Supporting Solutions for the Future or Fixing the Mistakes of the Past?http://denverurbanism.com/2017/06/supporting-solutions-future-fixing-mistakes-past.html
http://denverurbanism.com/2017/06/supporting-solutions-future-fixing-mistakes-past.html#commentsFri, 09 Jun 2017 15:19:51 +0000http://denverurbanism.com/?p=25786

The upcoming general obligation bond proposal is a tremendous opportunity for Denver. It will ask an important question beyond simply, “Do we want shiny new stuff?” It will also ask the voters, “How are we going to pay for our city?” Namely, will we make strategic investments to increase efficiency and capacity or will we use our once-a-decade bond issue to catch up on deferred maintenance?

There are arguments to be made on both sides of the issue. Catching up on deferred maintenance is definitely important. Rough streets are hard on cars and make driving more expensive and less convenient. Buildings needing basic repairs deteriorate more quickly than ones in good repair. City parks with broken sprinklers, dying trees, or broken playground equipment make it difficult to enjoy our community green space. But while these things should be brought to a state of good repair, I argue that spending bond money doing so would be an example of waste: not just a waste of opportunity but also a waste of money.

While spending money on maintenance is important, spending bond money on maintenance means we’re paying interest on every dollar we spend. Bond interest, though low, is still interest, and a dollar borrowed today will cost us two dollars by the time it’s paid off in 2028. So if we pay for maintenance out of our yearly budget instead of using bond money, we could fund just as much maintenance for half the amount of money. Paying for overdue maintenance out of bond funds shows bad governance: a government and citizenry that won’t commit to funding routine maintenance—when needed—out of the annual budget. Good urbanists should reject this kind of fecklessness.

As good urbanists, we shouldn’t just repair what has already been built in the current form, we should rebuild it to be more useful, to allow more people to live more comfortably in our city. If we want our transportation infrastructure to be used more efficiently, that is, if we want it to produce more wealth and a healthier city in all senses of the word, then we need to invest in projects which upgrade that infrastructure, not ones that maintain the status quo. Simply repaving or rebuilding will only get us back to square one. We need to get ahead of square one, by investing our bond funds in projects which will move more people in more sustainable ways to where they need to go. Catching up on maintenance can, by definition, only move the same amount of people at the same speed and, remember, at twice the price.

We want Denver to continue to thrive, and so we should be investing for the future, not just catching up with the mistakes of the past. We should be spending money in a way that will make a difference in the way our city runs, indeed in our neighbors’ lives. And so we need your help. Yes, you! Call your councilperson. Write them an email. Talk to them in person and tell them that, while maintenance is important, we must do better than tread water: we must move Denver towards a better future. And while you’re at it, tell them to start fully funding maintenance every year, through the regular budget process, so that the next time a bond issue rolls around we can dream even bigger and truly be proud of our beautiful and bustling city.

In 2012, Denver’s Civic Center Park became the city’s first National Historic Landmark. It has a lot to brag about. Built under Mayor Robert W. Speer (yes, that Speer), the park offers pristine structures and plenty of green space in an iconic location at the heart of downtown right next to the Colorado Capitol and the City and County of Denver building. It epitomizes the City Beautiful movement which can trace its popularity to the 1893 Chicago’s World Fair, where Mayor Speer got the idea to construct the park. The only problem? Something was already there.

In fact, there were a lot of somethings there. The capitol building was constructed in the 1890s, although the historic dome wouldn’t be finished until 1908. There was also the McNichols Civic Center Building, which opened in 1907 as a Carnegie Library. In addition to these structures, there were two full city blocks filled with shops, homes, and other buildings. Early maps tell quite a story. Across the street from the capitol there were businesses of all kinds. A cigar factory was located on Broadway, as was an ice cream factory. Hotels dotted the area. A school of art was off the alley between Broadway and S. Fifteenth Street, which continued directly south and paralleled Broadway before the park was built. It is now Acoma Street. On Cortland Street, which ran east/west between Colfax and 14th Avenue and no longer exists, there was a livery and several houses, and a drug store held a piece of prime real estate on the southwest corner of Colfax and Broadway.

Below are scans of two early maps showing the blocks between Bannock Street (labeled as S. Fourteenth) and Broadway, from Colfax to 14th Avenue, where Civic Center Park is today. The first image shows cropped parts from Sheets 6 and 20 of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from 1890, courtesy of the University of Colorado Boulder Library. Colfax Avenue wouldn’t be curved around the park for nearly thirty more years. The second image shows a cropped part of Plate 13 from the Baist Real Estate Atlas and Surveys of Denver from 1905. As can be seen in the 1890 map, a boarding house once stood at the southeast corner of Colfax and Bannock. By the 1905 map, the Carnegie Library (today’s McNichols Building) was shown.

In 1904, Mayor Speer was elected to the office for the first of three terms. He immediately proposed plans for a civic center park, and some projects started. A plan to extend 16th Street to the capitol building was called for but defeated. By 1912, nothing had happened, and Mayor Speer lost reelection, thus killing the plan… until Mayor Speer won his third term in 1916. Work on the park began immediately and everything between Broadway, Bannock, Colfax, and 14th Avenue was razed.

Below are photos of today’s McNichols Building, the only building on the two city blocks that survived, and the Civic Center Park’s ample green space and many monuments.

By 1917, Mayor Speer and the City of Denver had their park. This beautiful park connected the Colorado Capitol building to…nothing. The City and County Building didn’t begin construction until the mid-1920s, and Mayor Speer, who spent nearly 15 years championing the park, passed away from the flu in 1918.

Today, the park offers great views of the Colorado State Capitol and the City and County of Denver Building. The streets around the park are often closed for festivals and events, allowing pedestrians to roam freely around the neighborhood.

Had Denver forgone Civic Center Park, there is no telling what might be there now. The benefits of the park can easily be seen, with the Library, the Art Museum, and the Colorado Supreme Court all adjacent to it. Nonetheless, many of the homes and buildings that were torn down would now be considered historic landmarks of their own, but only if they survived the backhoe in the 1960s and 1970s when Denver tore down half of downtown in the name of urban revival.

The Cinco da Mayo Festival is one of many events which are held in and around the park throughout the year. The Voorhies Memorial serves as the north entrance to the park and as the gateway to Downtown Denver.

Now the park offers plenty of space and panoramic views. The blocks to the west of the park have become a government center and, to the south of the park, multiple museums and the main branch of the Denver Public Library offer a lot for residents and visitors to enjoy.

~~~

Kyle Dobbins is a resident of Capitol Hill and, after teaching music for three years, he studied urban geography at CU Denver. Originally from the Columbus, Ohio area, he moved to Denver in 2012 after living in Wyoming for six years. His focus is on transportation planning and historical urbanism. He teaches music for Denver Public Schools and has remained active in the urban planning community in Denver.

For the past twelve years, DenverInfill has been tracking development in and around downtown Denver. There has been plenty to follow. The surface parking lots, which spanned multiple city blocks in the 1970s, have slowly but surely been turned into apartments, offices, hotels, and other structures which have worked to reunite the urban fabric that comprises Downtown Denver. In some of the neighborhoods surrounding Downtown, new development is taking on a slightly different form.

Capitol Hill was not spared from the razing which occurred throughout the mid-1900s, but for the most part, it was limited to the northwest corner of the neighborhood around the Colorado State Capitol and along Broadway. Small parking lots exist throughout the neighborhood, but these aren’t large enough to build significant structures offering hundreds of apartments. Many of these lots have seen small scale development, but larger projects have been absent for the most part. Only two projects have been completed in the eastern half of Capitol Hill in the last ten years, compared to Brighton Boulevard where there are 17 projects planned, under construction, or completed in the last five years. This can partially be attributed to the fact that Capitol Hill wasn’t subjected to as much demolition as other neighborhoods and maintained a higher density level than other parts of Denver. As Denver continues to grow, developers will look for new opportunities to build to meet the strong demand for new urban housing. At the same time, the public’s desire for historical preservation can affect these developments. This is the case with two small adaptive reuse projects presently being constructed in Capitol Hill.

The Jux
Empty for several years, 821 Corona was previously an antique shop in an old two-floor mixed-use structure from the early 1900s. Last year, under the direction of Endurance Partners, the building was gutted, save for the original brickwork on three sides. Next month, it will open as a 30-unit apartment building on three floors with a ground level parking garage. Called The Jux, the structure preserves some of the look and feel of the neighborhood while adding density to the area. It is expected to be completed in June 2017.

At one point in the past, Chevron Gasoline clearly had something to do with this building as this beautiful brickwork sign was revealed and restored during renovations. Included in the images below is a rendering of the completed project, courtesy of Endurance Partners.

Ogden Flats
A second project just a few blocks away is also saving the exterior of an older structure while adding new residential to Capitol Hill. The Penn Garage was originally built in 1923 at 1300 Ogden Street. Like 821 Corona Street, it has been sitting empty for several years. Generation Development began construction on the Ogden Flats last year. This is a 5-story condominium project that will provide 29 new homes to the Capitol Hill neighborhood while preserving the original exterior brickwork of the structure. It is expected to be completed this fall. Below are three photos of construction activity at the site, along with a rendering of the project, courtesy of Generation Development and architect Range Design.

The desire to preserve our city while accommodating the incredible growth we are experiencing may demand these smaller-scale developments, especially in areas of the city which don’t have a lot of empty lots. Particularly in historic Capitol Hill, these adaptive reuse projects could become the norm as Denver works to strengthen its urban fabric.

~~~

Kyle Dobbins is a resident of Capitol Hill and, after teaching music for three years, he studied urban geography at CU Denver. Originally from the Columbus, Ohio area, he moved to Denver in 2012 after living in Wyoming for six years. His focus is on transportation planning and historical urbanism. He teaches music for Denver Public Schools and has remained active in the urban planning community in Denver.

Each year, I give a number of 2-hour “City Transformed” walking tours of different parts of Downtown Denver that are fundraisers for the Denver Architectural Foundation. I serve on the Board of Directors of the DAF and the money we raise through these walking tours helps us put on Doors Open Denver and a variety of other programs and events for the public.

The focus of my walking tours, as the “City Transformed” title suggests, is on how the urban fabric of Denver—its streets, blocks, buildings, and public spaces—were formed and subsequently transformed over the decades by various physical, economic, cultural, and technological forces. Cities—and downtowns in particular—are dynamic places, and no where else is that better exemplified than in Downtown Denver. The tours cover a mix of architecture, urban design, city planning, and Denver history while taking a pleasant stroll through a part of downtown.

Tickets are $20 for Denver Architectural Foundation members and $25 for non-members and all proceeds benefit the Denver Architectural Foundation. Each tour is capped at 20 people maximum, so REGISTER TODAY!! The links below will take you directly to the Eventbrite registration page for that specific tour date, where you can purchase tickets with a credit card.

Below is a list of my upcoming 2017 “City Transformed” tours. Tour location information and other details are provided on the Eventbrite registration pages. This list of 2017 tours is also available as a permalink under the Special Features menu above.

THE CITY TRANSFORMED: DENVER’S UNION STATION DISTRICT
This two-hour walking tour explores Denver’s booming Union Station District from an urban planning and development perspective. Learn about the introduction of the railroad to the Central Platte Valley in the early 1870s; the creation of the historic Union Station building in the 1880s and its expansion in the early 1900s as the city’s bustling gateway to the world; the decline of railroads and the Valley’s crumbling infrastructure and underutilization in the post-WWII era; the decades-long planning effort that led to the area’s remarkable transformation; and the recent transit investments and building boom that have propelled the Union Station area into one of the country’s hottest urban districts.

THE CITY TRANSFORMED: DENVER’S LOWER DOWNTOWN DISTRICT
This two-hour walking tour explores Denver’s historic Lower Downtown District from an urban planning and development perspective. Learn about LoDo as the city’s birthplace near the confluence of the Platte River and Cherry Creek and the development of its streets, blocks, and buildings; the area’s transformation into a warehouse district with the addition of Denver Union Station in 1881; the district’s decline in the post-WWII era into the city’s skid-row; LoDo’s remarkable revitalization through historic preservation and adaptive reuse into the thriving mixed-use district of today; and what the future holds as new developments replace surface parking lots.

THE CITY TRANSFORMED: DENVER’S CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT
This two-hour walking tour explores Denver’s Central Business District from an urban planning and development perspective. Discover how downtown Denver grew and expanded from its early 19th century roots to the modern high-rise city of today and how major interventions like the Skyline urban renewal project in the 1970s, the 16th Street Mall in the 1980s, the Colorado Convention Center and Light Rail in the 1990s, and dozens of infill developments since 2000 have shaped the core of downtown. Special focus will be given to the 43 buildings that make up the Downtown Denver Historic District and how historic preservation and adaptive reuse have preserved many of downtown’s most important and iconic structures.

THE CITY TRANSFORMED: DENVER’S CIVIC CENTER/GOLDEN TRIANGLE MUSEUM DISTRICT
This two-hour walking tour explores the ongoing transformation of Denver’s historic Civic Center and Golden Triangle Museum District from an urban planning and development perspective. Learn about the historic Civic Center Park as one of the nation’s best examples of a City Beautiful era public space, the diverse governmental and cultural buildings ringing the park, recent and proposed museum projects, new infill developments, and other changes planned for Denver’s civic heart that is rich in history, symbolism, and iconic architecture.

THE CITY TRANSFORMED: DENVER’S 14TH STREET
This two-hour walking tour explores the length of Denver’s thriving 14th Street from an urban planning and development perspective. Anchored on one end by the modern Wellington Webb Municipal Building in Civic Center and by the historic storefronts of Larimer Square in Lower Downtown at the other, 14th Street serves as one of Downtown’s most important corridors. Along its stretch, 14th Street offers big-city facilities like the Colorado Convention Center and the Denver Performing Arts Complex as well as a mix of hotel, office, residential, and educational uses in an eclectic array of historic and modern structures along an attractive streetscape. Learn how 14th Street will continue to transform through high-rise developments and transportation investments in the near future.

Denver’s premier public celebration of our city’s architecture and urban design—Doors Open Denver 2017—is scheduled for Saturday, April 29 and Sunday, April 30!

WHAT IS DOORS OPEN DENVER?
Doors Open Denver is an annual two-day event that provides opportunities for residents and visitors to explore our city and learn about and connect with many of Denver’s unique spaces and high-profile, intriguing, and historic buildings and sites. Doors Open Denver tells the story of the past, present, and future of Denver’s built environment.

Doors Open Denver is the flagship event of the Denver Architectural Foundation. I’ve had the honor of serving on the DAF board of directors for the past several years, and helping organize Doors Open Denver has been a very rewarding experience.

At this year’s Doors Open Denver, there are 119 different sites and tours to choose from, including 68Open Sites that are free and self-guided, and 51Insider Tours that are fee-based and require pre-registration.

Insider Tour tickets went on sale on Monday, April 3 for Denver Architectural Foundation members, and tickets will be available for purchase by non-members starting Monday, April 17. If you become a new DAF member before April 17, you’ll receive an exclusive tour registration and purchase link. Insider Tour tickets sell quickly, so if you’re not already, join the DAF to have a chance to buy your tickets before non-members!

DOORS OPEN DENVER VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES
Would you like to be a part of the Doors Open Denver volunteer team? There are numerous opportunities to volunteer at Open Sites throughout the weekend, so if you are looking for a chance to give back to your community and learn about some of Denver’s treasured spaces, please volunteer! Click here for the Doors Open Denver Sites Volunteer Signup website, and contact Kyle Long at kyle@denverarchitecture.org with your questions. Volunteers make Doors Open Denver possible, so please join us!

BOX CITY!
A very special part of Doors Open Denver is Box City. Box City is a free event for children—grades K-5—where participants learn about the process of urban development and the principles that make for sound architecture, design and planning. Children start with a Building Permit for their desired building type, make a draft sketch of their building in the Design Studio if they want, stop at the Hardware Store to get their cardboard and paper supplies, then head to the Construction Zone to make their Box City structure. After completing the Building Inspection process, participants head to the Box City street grid where an Urban Planner helps them select an appropriate building site. Finally, children finish the process by picking up their Certificate of Occupancy that includes a photo of them with their building. How fun is that!

Box City 2017 will be held on Saturday, April 29 in the atrium of the Wellington Webb Municipal Office Building at 15th and Court Place in Downtown Denver. Box City opens at 9:00 AM and last entry is at 1:00 PM. If you want to sign your kids up to participate in Box City, please visit the Box City registration page where you can review all the participating rules and instructions and reserve your tickets. Tickets are limited, so don’t delay! Walk-ins are welcome on a first-come, first-served basis after ticketholders have been admitted and if space is available. We also have a nice Box City flyer with all the details.

BOX CITY VOLUNTEER OPPORTUNITIES
Would you like to volunteer to work at Box City or donate boxes for the event? You can do that! We have a few Box City event volunteer positions left, so if you’re interested, please sign up here. If you’d like to donate clean cardboard boxes and tubes for Box City, please download and review this flyer for all the details.

TRANSPORTATION
The Denver Architectural Foundation strongly encourages the use of public transportation, biking, and walking for getting around Doors Open Denver. Also check out our special Doors Open Denver promotions from car2go and Denver B-cycle.

Tens of thousands of people annually participate in Doors Open Denver and it keeps getting bigger and better every year. Get out there and explore your city!

It’s pretty hard to make an argument that car-dependency is good. Some people try to say that its necessary, maybe, but credible arguments that car-dependency is a good thing are elusive. By almost any metric, our over-dependence on motor vehicles does not benefit us. Cars pollute, they make us less healthy, and they isolate us in our own neighborhoods because instead of encountering neighbors as we walk around our streets at 3 miles per hour, we’re cocooned in our metal boxes going 30.

Some folks insist that personal vehicles are necessary because we don’t yet have adequate transit or multi-modal infrastructure in place. Before we can start reducing and eliminating parking minimums, they say, we need to invest more in these other things first. It’s true: we do need to invest more in these things. But arguing about the chicken or the egg doesn’t help us advance either.

Here’s what we know for certain: the only guaranteed outcome of creating more parking spaces is more driving.

Polls like this one from 2015 show that Denverites feel that “the single most pressing issue facing the City and County of Denver today” after affordable housing is “transportation and traffic.” When we consider that we’ve been planning to accommodate and prioritize car traffic for decades and yet traffic is still a more pressing concern than homelessness or public safety, anything that results in more driving is moving us in the wrong direction.

The chicken or egg argument is not new, and the city of Atlanta offers a good example of planners facing this problem. In a story on Atlanta’s public radio station, senior planner Tim Keane responds to the chicken or egg problem by suggesting that “You really have to start with the density and less parking. If you don’t, then you’ve lost your opportunity, because once you’ve built that infrastructure, it’s so difficult to undo that.” The story observes that Atlanta is a city filled with parking structures that have become a huge obstacle to a truly revitalized urban core.

I’d also suggest that claims of the inadequacy of transit and bike/ped infrastructure in Denver are a little overblown and can themselves contribute to a narrative of a low-functioning system that isn’t accurate and that probably offers people an excuse to remain dependent on their cars. It also reflects a certain kind of privilege to claim that you must have a car to live in this town, since there are many folks who don’t have a car and rely on transit and other modes to get around.

The best example I can provide of the basic functionality of our transit/bike/ped system is my own. I’ll be the first to concede that Denver’s current multi-modal infrastructure legitimately doesn’t work for some people, but it is entirely adequate for more people than many would think. For example, last week I rode my bike from my house in Park Hill out to my job in Aurora as I do most days, but I also had two appointments to get to later in the afternoon in central Denver. I was able to leave work a little early, so I rode my bike to my first appointment at my son’s school, and then I hopped on the 24 bus and took it up to 22nd Avenue where I got off and rode my bike the remaining half mile to a doctor’s appointment. In other words, thanks to transit and our existing bike/ped infrastructure, I got to work and to two separate appointments without the use of a personal vehicle. This was not an atypical day.

So, Denver has a chicken. Maybe it’s more like a proto-chicken, and not fully realized yet, but it works for a lot of people. Let’s stop arguing about whether the chicken came before the egg or vice versa, and start saying “YES” to both the chicken and the egg. It’s the only way we’ll get either.

]]>http://denverurbanism.com/2017/04/the-chicken-or-the-egg-debate-is-actually-a-red-herring.html/feed8We’ve Built Denver Around Driving, But We Should Stophttp://denverurbanism.com/2017/04/weve-built-denver-around-driving-but-we-should-stop.html
http://denverurbanism.com/2017/04/weve-built-denver-around-driving-but-we-should-stop.html#commentsSat, 01 Apr 2017 21:43:20 +0000http://denverurbanism.com/?p=25630

Time is equal to money; this is a truism. It’s also a fiscal reality: time spent traveling is time not spent doing. You don’t get paid while you drive to work, only while you’re at work. This can amount to several hours every day in an unpaid purgatory, neither working nor relaxing. It’s why the City spends millions of dollars every year trying to move cars as quickly as possible from people’s residences to their workplaces.

This has resulted in a network of streets designed to move car traffic quickly over large distances, but what we’ve found as our city has grown is that building our transportation network to move cars at high speed is not the same thing as efficiently moving people, nor is it the same thing as making our local economy strong and resilient. It does not result in happy citizens moving quickly from A to B. It does not result in welcoming streets that build wealth and create strong neighborhoods. Instead, we’ve seen it degrade and destroy small businesses along reconfigured thoroughfares, make people’s homes almost uninhabitable, and lower tax revenues along these (allegedly) high-speed roadways. How did this happen?

On a basic level it comes down to our land use. We’ve built the majority of our housing separated from everything else that we need to in order to live life. If you need to make dinner, can you walk to the grocery store? How about a restaurant? Nope, gotta drive. What about transit? Not practical, takes too long. This is only partially a failing of the transit itself. When our city is built to prioritize the isolation of housing from other uses, then trying to efficiently run a bus from where people live to where they need to go is naturally difficult and expensive.

We do have a choice though. We can continue to try and square the circle by insisting that single-family home neighborhoods always remain so, ensuring that their residents are always forced to drive ten or fifteen minutes just to buy a gallon of milk or eat at a nice restaurant. Or we could start retrofitting our neighborhoods to allow more housing and mixed uses and stop freaking out when development happens in the many areas already zoned for more compact development. There are undoubtedly some people who would prefer to keep things as they are, with the nightmarish traffic and the acres of parking lots in front of big box stores sitting along our stroads like Colorado or Hampden, but there is a growing contingent of folks who recognize that this model isn’t sustainable and doesn’t make for a great city.

I think the answer is right up there in the name of this blog: urbanism—the idea that we need the City to make it easy to live, not easy to drive. It’s in the name of the recently formed YIMBY Denver—the idea that we’re not going to survive by fighting development but by acknowledging that Denver needs to allow densification and diversification in order to make our neighborhoods thrive. We need to allow new uses in our neighborhoods in order to make our streets work better, and we need to welcome new neighbors in order to make Denver that much greater.